The Southern California Kriegsspiel Society
Krie by Marshall Neal
Old things become new again. That’s the case with Kriegsspiel, the wargame developed by the Prussian Army in 1812 to train officers. The game has enjoyed a renaissance of sorts, thanks to the internet and social media. My goal in this article is to teach you a little bit about the game, my experience running games, and how you too can organize your own Kriegsspiel games. First, let’s get the awful truth out of the way. Kriegsspiel, which is
German for “war game” is not a war game at all. It is not fun, and in its original form, it is not worth playing. It was hated by the cadets who were forced to sit for hours in hot or freezing classrooms waiting for their professors to deliver scathing critiques of how miserably they failed. Kriegsspiel was developed by the Prussian Army with its first set of rules codified and named, Instructions for the Representation of Tactical Maneuvers under the Guise of a Wargame. The game is the great grandfather of all wargames played today. It was the first time scaled maps were used as a playing field. Maps were divided into grids, and standardized pieces represented the precise size the formations were expected to occupy in the field. Combat results tables were researched and tabulated for the various situations and types of arms and ordinance used at the time. Finally, dice provided a random element and were used to decide the outcome of each exchange of fire. The game was played double blind, with two teams, red and blue, at two tables, usually in different rooms. An umpire maintained a third table in another room. The umpire’s map showed everything, a god’s view of the battle. Red and blue could only see those units visible to their sides. On some occasions, players were given a small copy of the map and isolated from their team. Players were not allowed to speak to their teammates about their plans. Instead, they were required to relay orders and information though an umpire. Umpires calculated the time it would take for couriers to deliver the messages, and only then could a cadet act on what information the message contained. 006
Not only were the games an elaborate form of torture for eager, young cadets, they often took a long time to play. Of course, that’s also true for many monster wargames today. So far it sounds like a wargame, so why the negativity? The reason is, Kriegsspiel wasn’t played as a wargame. It wasn’t intended to be any more fun than the drill infantry soldiers were forced to perform ad nauseam. It was a tool for teaching and testing a cadet’s mastery of tactics and their character and suitability as officers. And in 1812, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, the lessons were serious, since the fate of a nation depended on how well these young cadets would perform in the field. Kriegsspiel became a valuable tool and it was even played by experienced generals to wargame possible scenarios. The officers of the Prussian Army also recognized that the game could be improved. Over time, the game was standardized with maps at 1:8000 scale, and turns representing two minutes of game time. In 1876, General Julius von Verdy du Vernois developed “Free Kriegsspiel” a version that did away with a lot of the original’s time-consuming minutiae and focused more on tactics. The general even did away with dice, and relied on the umpire’s sole judge-